Cyprus Fears Russian Meddling in Its Settlement Talks

NICOSIA, Cyprus — As the United Nations geared up for negotiations that it declared the “best and last chance” to unite Cyprus after more than four decades of acrimonious division, Russia’s ambassador attended a seminar dedicated to derailing any prospect of an agreement between Greek and Turkish Cypriots.

The presence of the ambassador, Stanislav Osadchiy, delighted hard-line Greek Cypriot politicians in Nicosia, the capital of the Greek-speaking south of the divided island. They had helped torpedo a 2004 reunification plan supported by the United States and have now rallied together to defeat a new push for a settlement that began on Jan. 12 with an international conference in Geneva.

But Mr. Osadchiy’s attendance at the seminar, which Western and other diplomats shunned, angered Nicos Anastasiades, the Greek-Cypriot president of the Republic of Cyprus and a strong supporter of efforts to resolve an interethnic dispute as intractable and nearly as protracted as the Israel-Palestine conflict.

In an interview in Nicosia, Mr. Anastasiades said that, when questioned, the ambassador had apologized and said he had misunderstood the nature of the seminar, despite its clear anti-settlement agenda and the fact that it had been organized by five small political parties all bitterly opposed to a compromise deal in Geneva.

The president said he accepted the ambassador’s explanation and his insistence that he had not meant to endorse the so-called rejectionists by attending. But, Mr. Anastasiades added, “I consider any intervention by any third country as not what we are looking for.”

Like countless previous diplomatic efforts to reunite Cyprus since Turkey invaded in 1974 and split the country in two, the recent Geneva talks failed to achieve a breakthrough, though they did make some progress. Mr. Anastasiades said the two sides were “halfway” to an agreement but still had deep divisions, notably on the issue of whether Turkey, Greece and Britain, the former colonial master, should retain their status as “guarantors” of the island’s security, a setup that Russia rejects.

Bound to Russia by a shared Orthodox Christian faith and its role as a financial and banking center for Russian business, the Republic of Cyprus, the Greek-speaking nation in the south of the island, has long looked to Moscow as a protector rather than a troublemaker.

But accusations that Moscow intervened to skew the United States presidential election and supported anti-establishment forces across Europe have stirred a wave of alarm about Russia in the European Union, of which the Republic of Cyprus is a member. This alarm, which Russia dismisses as Russophobic hysteria, has given new force to voices in Cyprus warning that Russia’s geopolitical interests have made it determined to upset a Cyprus settlement.

Makarios Drousiotis, a Greek-Cypriot researcher who has long bucked pro-Russian sentiment in Cyprus and sought to expose what he sees as Russian meddling, said events in the United States and Europe were shaking his compatriots’ view that Moscow had only their best interests at heart.

“What they have been doing in America and Europe they have been doing for 50 years in Cyprus,” said Mr. Drousiotis, who in 2014 published a book, “The Cyprus Crisis and the Cold War,” that demolished what he called a Moscow-generated “myth” that the West is to blame for Turkey’s 1974 invasion of the island and the decades of division that followed.

The book, denounced by Russia’s diplomatic mission in Nicosia as “politically unacceptable,” portrayed Moscow as a duplicitous partner that had for decades used disinformation, front organizations and other tools of subterfuge to woo support among Greek-Cypriots while working behind the scenes to stoke tensions to ensure that Cyprus never aligned too firmly with the West or became a NATO member.

To Moscow’s fury, this once taboo view that Russia wants to block a settlement has in recent weeks been discussed openly in some Cypriot media outlets. The Cyprus Mail, for example, described Russia’s ambassador, Mr. Osadchiy, as “the darling” of anti-settlement forces “because he regularly says things aimed at undermining the talks or making the pursuit of a deal more difficult.”

Maria Zakharova, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said Moscow was “surprised by the anti-Russia comments in the Cyprus media” and accused the media of creating “a smoke screen for the real problems that need to be tackled as part of the Cypriot settlement.”

Mr. Drousiotis said the Russian ambassador’s apparent support for so-called rejectionist politicians ahead of the Geneva talks fit a long, but previously mostly ignored, pattern.

“Every time there has been an attempt to solve the Cyprus issue, the Russians have jumped in to block a settlement,” Mr. Drousiotis said.

A solution in Cyprus would end a deep rift within NATO between Turkey and Greece, both members, and open the way to the development of large gas reserves in the eastern Mediterranean that could upset the grip of Gazprom, Russia’s state-controlled energy giant, on the Turkish market.

Turkey imports nearly 99 percent of its natural gas, more than half from Russia, its biggest supplier by far. Gas from Egyptian, Israeli and Cypriot fields in the Mediterranean would be cheaper than supplies from Gazprom, but it has little chance of reaching Turkish consumers so long as arguments over territorial waters and other matters between Greek and Turkish Cypriots obstruct the development of pipelines.

In 2004, ahead of a referendum in Cyprus on whether to accept a reunification plan proposed by Kofi Annan, who was the secretary general of the United Nations at the time, Russia vetoed a Security Council resolution relating to security arrangements on the island that all other Council members supported.

Hopes for the so-called Annan plan then took another big blow when AKEL, the influential pro-Moscow communist party in southern Cyprus, dropped its previous support and, on the eve of the referendum, urged voters to reject the plan, as did the Orthodox Church. In the end, the north voted to accept the plan, while voters in the south rejected it.

Yet another international effort collapsed after hackers penetrated the United Nations computer system and, in 2009, leaked emails and documents to a pro-Russian Cypriot newspaper. Some of the documents were doctored in a way that inflamed Greek-Cypriot fears of any settlement. The United Nations concluded that only a foreign intelligence service could have orchestrated such an operation.

Mr. Anastasiades, speaking at the presidential palace in Nicosia, said that his country counted Russia as a friend, but that it had to take care not to give fuel to those who questioned Russia’s intentions, as the ambassador did by attending the seminar.

Russia has responded angrily to accusations that it has been working against its own stated policy in favor of a Cyprus solution. Vladimir A. Chizhov, Russia’s ambassador to the European Union, issued a scathing statement on Jan. 13 to denounce what he called “preposterous” reports that Russia wanted to block a settlement.

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In 1974, Turkey invaded Cyprus and divided the island nation in two.CreditAssociated Press

“Evidently, anti-Russian hysteria is becoming contagious. Overzealous fighters of the (dis)information front are working day and night trying to implicate Russia in all sorts of problems, including those that are the direct result of shortsighted and arrogant policies of others,” Mr. Chizhov, a veteran diplomat who earlier served at the embassy in Nicosia, said in the statement.

Harry Tzimitras, director of the Nicosia branch of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, said many obstacles blocked a settlement irrespective of Russia, notably the gulf between Greek and Turkish Cypriots on the issue of whether the Turkish military should be allowed to keep troops on the island after reunification.

“The fundamental mistrust” between the two sides, Mr. Tzimitras said, is the main reason for the failure of decades of diplomatic efforts to reach a settlement. “In Cyprus, you rarely fight facts,” he said. “You fight perceptions and ghosts.”

All the same, he added, some think that Russia has many reasons, despite its public position, to want the island to stay divided.

“In this view, the status quo is working very well for Russia,” Mr. Tzimitras said. “They don’t want it disrupted.”

Aside from strengthening NATO and damaging Gazprom, a reunification deal would deliver a success to the United States, whose diplomats have been particularly active in trying to prod Greece, Turkey and their ethnic kin in Cyprus toward an agreement.

Mr. Anastasiades said the main obstacle to a solution was Turkey, whose increasingly autocratic president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, recently said Turkish troops must be allowed to stay in Cyprus “forever.”

Mr. Anastasiades has forged good relations with the leader of Turkish-controlled northern Cyprus, Mustafa Akinci, but, he said, “the solution does not depend on the Turkish Cypriots but on Ankara’s will.”

The issue of troops is tightly connected with another big hurdle — demands by Mr. Anastasiades, urged on by Russia, that Turkey, Greece and Britain be stripped of their role as guarantors. Moscow has long wanted to scrap this system, continuing a Soviet-era policy that was based in part on its desire to weaken the role of Britain, a NATO member that has military bases and a listening post in Cyprus.

Mr. Anastasiades said it was up to Mr. Erdogan to decide what he wanted. “His rhetoric is that he is in favor, but what remains to be seen is whether in practice he is supporting a solution,” Mr. Anastasiades said.

As for Russia and the United States, Mr. Anastasiades said, Cyprus understands “the games superpowers play.”

“We want the support of everyone who can give support,” he added. “It is a matter of survival.”

Correction:

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the surname of the Russian ambassador to Cyprus at one point. As noted correctly elsewhere in the article, he is Stanislav Osadchiy, not Osdachiy.

Dimitris Bounias contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Cypriots Fear Russian Meddling in Settlement Talks. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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